


First Encounters

by fransoun



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Pre-War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-12
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-17 01:06:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2291321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fransoun/pseuds/fransoun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A long time ago, a archivist named Orion Pax met a gladiator named Megatronus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

There were _always_ records to sort through.

Stacks of datapads covered Orion's desk. The archivist sat comfortably in their midst, bent over a single pad, sunlight from the narrow window slanting across his back. Glittering motes of dust filtered slowly through the air as he read, his optics scanning over the glowing blue lines of text.

The pad contained an old application to the Iaconian Academy of Science and Technology. A miner from Tarn (dataform 01-D) had applied for admission into the medical track (dataform 28-C). He'd been granted the required change of caste (the dataform number here was corrupted, and Orion made a note) and admitted (dataform 03-F).  

Orion set the pad down and leaned back in his chair, arching his hands over his head to stretch out his spinal strut. He'd been at his task all day, and he'd managed to get himself so absorbed in it that he'd forgotten to move - again. It was a bad habit of his, one Ratchet grumbled at him about every time Orion came to see the medic with a crick in his neck.

But Orion couldn't seem to help it.

He picked up the pad again and flicked back through the dataforms, trying to put his finger on what exactly it was about this record that tugged at the strings of his processor. He'd been through dozens of records today, but none of them had stuck in his mind quite the way this one had. He reread it again, seeking the source of his unease.

An application to the Academy was not unusual - there had been several in this particular batch of records. An application to the medical track was not unusual, either - the Academy was the only place on Cybertron that a doctor could receive medical training.

A change of caste...Orion frowned. He had never heard of such a thing before. A mechanism's caste, like his designation, was assigned upon his emergence from the Well based on the characteristics and attributes of his spark.

Perhaps, though, those tests were sometimes wrong? It must happen on occasion if there was a dataform to accompany it.

A miner...?

Orion's frown deepened. He sat unmoving in his chair as the light played across his frame, lost deep in his own internal archives as he searched his memory and tried to remember.

***

Jazz could always tell when his friend had something on his mind. The tall archivist would walk along with his head bowed and his optics unfocused, and it was left to Jazz to guide him around any obstacles in his path - street lights, sign posts, buildings, other mechs. Tonight alone, Jazz had steered him clear of at least two high-ranking senators. He'd breathed a sigh of relief when they'd come within sight of their destination and gently tugged his friend through the door of a nightclub in lower Iacon.

Orion's stabilizers had immediately begun struggling to compensate. The archivist had never particularly enjoyed the pounding music, the strobing lights, or the crushing crowds of such venues, but his friend did, and his friend also enjoyed having him along. Jazz always claimed he was broadening Orion's cultural horizons, as befit a cultural investigator, and while Orion would invariably remind Jazz that he was a _historical_ archivist, he went along anyway.

Jazz's eyes lingered on the dance floor as he sipped at his drink, finger tapping along with the beat, but Orion contemplated the cube in front of him, processor subroutines overriding optical focusing as he thought.

Suddenly, the finger had reached up to tap on his shoulder. Orion looked up.

"What's on your mind, mech? You seem cities away."

Orion hesitated for a moment and then voiced the question that had been shuffled to the forefront of his priority queue.

"Have you ever heard of a miner becoming a doctor?"

"What?"

Orion turned up the volume on his vocalizer, wincing as he did so. "Have you ever heard of a miner becoming a doctor?"

Jazz sighed and gave his friend A Look. It was a tired, put-upon sort of Look. It was A Look that said, 'No, friend. This is not where we think. This is where we have the good times. I brought us here for the good times. Come, friend, and let us have the good times now. The thinking must wait until tomorrow.'

It was A Look the fun-loving mech had had plenty of occasion to give Orion, and, as always, it had precisely no effect at all on its intended target. Orion continued to wait patiently for Jazz's answer, so Jazz went ahead and vocalized a reply.

"Nah, mech. I can't say that I have, but then, that's not really my area of expertise. Why'd'ya ask?"

Orion resumed staring at his cube. "I do not know."

Jazz stared at him, and the finger reached over to gently tap his helm. "You sure you haven't been devlin' too deep into the records, Pax? Maybe it's time to give yourself a break."

Orion nodded slowly, already lost in thought again. With a sigh and shrug, Jazz set his drink down and headed out onto the dance floor.

***

Orion brought the same question to Ratchet the next day.

The archivist stood head and shoulders above every other mechanism around him as he crossed the plaza of the Iacon Academy of Science and Technology. On every side, glittering towers of glass soared up towards the sun.

Inside, a wall of windows offered a superb view, the lights of the city far below curving away into the distance. On a clear day like today, Orion could almost imagine he could see all the way to the Sea of Light itself.

The esteemed medic himself was seated at his desk with his back to the view, sorting through a stack of datapads. As Orion entered, Ratchet tossed one back onto the pile with a clatter and a groan, rubbing at his optics.

"I don't understand how you do this all day, Pax."

Orion let the remark pass without comment. He seated himself on the other side of Ratchet's desk and settled his hands on his knees, waiting patiently for the medic's attention.

Ratchet glanced up from where his helm rested in his hands. "Do you need something, Pax?"

"I had a question I hoped you might be able to answer."

Ratchet waved a hand by way of permission, the other still cradling his helm.

"Have you ever heard of a miner becoming a doctor?"

Ratchet lifted his head long enough to give the archivist A Look. It was an irritable, exasperated sort of Look, but Ratchet wasn't really the sort to let his looks do the talking for him, so he just went ahead and said, "Pax, I've just spent an entire shift sorting through reports from the medical heads of each of the Primus-forsaken city-states on this Primus-forsaken planet, and all of them seem to have a multitude of unsolvable problems that only I can help them with. When I'm not sorting out those issues, I fill my cycles listening to the glitchheads on the Council and trying to knock it into their slag-for-processors helms that yes, the lower castes do need decent clinics just like the rest of us, thank you very much. And the rest of my time, if I'm 'lucky' enough to have any, I spend buried under administrative paperwork. I have absolutely no idea if any of our doctors were ever miners."

Orion bore up under the rant patiently, with no change in his solemn expression, and when Ratchet came to the end of it, merely nodded and said, "I see. Thank you, doctor, for your assistance." The archivist rose to his feet.

Oh, slag it. The CMO always felt guilty when he let loose at Pax like that. It wasn't the archivist's fault he'd been having a bad cycle.

"Orion," Ratchet said, with a little more kindness this time. "A miner wouldn't have what it takes to become a doctor. It's just not in their programming."

Orion nodded again, more slowly this time. Ratchet sighed and leaned back in his chair, picking the abandoned datapad back up off the pile. "Sorry I couldn't be more help, Pax."

Orion saw himself out.

***

Orion held another datapad in his hand.

This one contained an advertisement for an exhibition of a Praxian artist. A brief biography noted that the artist (their name had been corrupted, and Orion tapped his finger against the glitched symbols) had once been a construction worker in Kaon.

Familiar stirrings of unease spun up within the archivist's processor, and Orion pulled out the pad of the miner-doctor from Tarn and placed the two side-by-side.  He'd never archived the first, as he should have, and that alone was reason enough to unsettle him - keeping data hidden went against his primary function. His thoughts processes had often faltered and hung in the past week as he forced them down unfamiliar paths, and guilt had swirled constantly around his spark. He turned his attention back to the records.

They were both old - very old, dating back to early in the Golden Era, long enough for random transfer errors to have made their way into the data. And yet...it felt like a sensor ghost, the way suspicion lingered in his processor - he could neither see nor hear nor touch the cause of his unease, but he knew all the same that something was there.

He considered the records for a moment longer and then slid the pads carefully back into his desk.

Cycles passed, and a third and a fourth datapad joined the first two, then a fifth and sixth. Then more.

More and more of them, more of those records that made him pause and frown and wonder -  although what exactly about he remained uncertain.  He'd begun to seek them out deliberately now, stirring up dust in long forgotten corridors and delving deep into the hidden depths of the Archive’s central database.

The first two records had shared a common feature, so Orion searched for similar records - and found them disturbingly hard to come by. Broadening his search only revealed that modern census records stored a mechanism's caste in static variables , immutable constants permanently fixed at creation. For the first time in his existence, Orion found the archives of the Iacon Hall of Records to be lacking.

But he did not ask for help. Any of his fellow archivists could have aided in his search, and the assistance of the master archivist himself would have been invaluable. But he was competent enough in his function, Orion reasoned, and there was no need to consume valuable Archive resources on what was, after all, only a personal project.

That did not explain why he'd begun to erase all traces of his searches before he logged out of the archives at the end of the day. Orion could not say exactly why he was being so cautious, but there was something buried deep within all this that made his wires itch. He started locking the pads away in his desk at night.

A group of his fellow archivists often gathered outside the Hall of Records in the morning, joking and chatting with one another before their shifts began. This particular day, the day after Orion had slipped the seventh such record into his desk and locked it away, saw the loudest in the group bemoaning yet another day in the Archives. The complainer cast a longing look at the towering spires of upper Iacon and struck a pose, the back of his hand pressed against his forehelm.

"Ah, for the luxurious life of a Senator!"

His neighbor rolled his optics and elbowed him in the side, and the amateur dramatician grinned and threw up his hands in submission as his compatriots jostled and jeered him into silence.

But Orion's step faltered at his words.

The last piece fell into place, and something went _click_ in his mind. It was as though potential had been building up in his circuits of his processor for cycles now, perhaps even vorns, and those few words had been the last little particles of charge needed to send electricity spilling forth down new pathways that he had built up, bit by bit, ever since the day he'd found that record in the Archives and begun to wonder. A whole new section of his processor lit up with a blinding flash of illumination that left him staggering, struggling to comprehend.

Orion had been sparked an archivist. It was what he was, processor and soul. He could not imagine life as anything else and had never tried, for there had never been reason to do so - his form fit his function perfectly. He could never imagine himself as a cultural liaison like Jazz or a medic like Ratchet. He could never see himself as a Senator or a war-build or - or a Prime.

But for those unlike him, those who did not fit, those who desired an existence as something other than they were, what recourse was there? Did they even have a choice?

Orion Pax stood at his desk in the Iacon Hall of Records, hands braced against its surface, and realized that something, somewhere, had gone very, very wrong.


	2. Chapter 2

Orion Pax walked home slowly that night, deep in thought.

The caste system kept mechanisms firmly in their place. Orion had fit his assigned role well and been content, and far too long had passed before he ever considered that others might not share in his contentment. He had known, or at least vaguely assumed, that sparks were assessed upon their emergence from the Well, tested for their aptitudes, capabilities, and strengths, and he must have believed those assessments infallible, because otherwise -

\- well, there had never been an 'otherwise'. His thoughts had never ventured that far before.

They did now. The caste system kept mechanisms firmly in their place, whether they wished to be there or not.

Orion shook himself free of his musing and lifted his head, looking around for the first time since he'd left the Archives that evening.

A recent rain had scoured the streets clean, and their newly polished metal surfaces seemed to catch every single glint of light, reflecting and refracting them over and over again until they suffused the very air with their glow. An oil house stood open despite the late hour, and the murmuring of the patrons within spilled out the open window, its shutter raised to let in the cool night air. A small vidscreen on the wall outside played a newsfeed, but Orion paid it no attention.

Instead he stared at the mechanisms seated throughout the bar, enjoing their drinks. His fellow archivists had gathered at a table in the back, relaxing after their shifts with a cube and a chat. But no labor class mechanisms, with their hazard stripes painted in yellow and black, perched on the stools, and the dim light of the booths did not shine on the gilded filigree of the ruling elite. The lowly and the lofty did not drink with one another, or with the middling castes.

Orion's hand curled into a fist. The caste system was injust. No mechanism should be bound to their function. Such freedoms ought to be the right -

" - of every Cybertronian!" A voice bellowed, and Orion started, staggered back a few steps, and spun around, searching for the mechanism who had just read his mind. He looked up - and the newsfeed had vanished, replaced by the image of a shadowy figure. The image onscreen had been blurred, making recognition nearly impossible, but the words he spoke rang out clear as plasteel through the tinny speakers.

"Amalgamous bound himself to no single form, no single function, and he granted all future generations the right to do the same! We each, all of us, every sparked mechanism among us, deserve to choose the existence we lead for ourselves, and if our government will not grant us that freedom, then we will take it! We must - "

The feed cut off in a burst of static, and the vidscreen went dark with a snowy hiss. Orion stood, optics fixed on the screen, intakes stalled in his vents. One moment passed, then another, and then the newscast flickered back onscreen, its drone resuming as though it had never been interrupted. Orion stood there, hoping the mysterious broadcast would return, but the newsfeed played on.

Orion frowned and pushed open the door to the oil house. A service mechanism stood at the counter, polishing the dully gleaming metal. One of his fellow archivists caught sight of him entering and stood, waving him over, but Orion declined the invitation with a quick shake of his head. Instead, he approached the bar and cleared his vocalizer with a soft click. The mechanism looked up.

"Your vidscreen outside...what feed is it playing?" Orion asked.

The service mechansim looked suddenly wary, optics darting back and forth. "Why? What do you want to know?"

"A moment ago, it displayed a broadcast of some sorts. It interrupted - "

The service mech cut him off. "Look, the screen outside is hooked up to the central feed, same as everyone else's. All the equipment out there is standard and up to code. If you want to know what they're playing on it, take it up with them, not me."

Orion, taken aback, blinked, a quick shuttering of his optics. "I see. Thank you for your assistance."

The service mech grunted and went back to cleaning.

Orion walked back outside, thinking quickly. Though blurred, the mechanism onscreen had apeared broad-chested, and his outline had been thick and heavy, seemingly plated with industrial-grade metal. Orion might have thought him a construction worker or a miner, but no amount of blurring could hide the wicked spikes curving up from the mechanism's shoulders. He was most likely a combat-build, then, or a fighter-type frame. It was little enough, but Orion had that to go on, at least.

\---

Dawn was breaking over the Sea of Light, and the brightening glow of the sun on the horizon cast long shadows across the plaza outside of the Archives, where a group of fellow early risers had gathered to talk before their shifts.

“ - after his fight last night, Megatronus - you know, that gladiator?  He made another one of those speeches of his.”

Orion paused midstep, hesitating.

The data clerk knew well the stories of the original Thirteen - he'd studied them under Apha Trion, the master archivist handing down the tales as they were written in the Covenant of Primus. To hear their names spoken outside the Hall, though, and for the second time in as many days...Orion found it hard to convince himself it was mere coincidence.

But the speaker had called Megatronus a gladiator? And one who had fought the prior evening, at that, and had then made a speech...

The mechanism onscreen last night had been heavily built, like a combat-build or a fighter-type - or a gladiator. And that mechanism had referred to the original Thirteen, too...

Orion approached the group.

"I've got the transcript right here." The mech held up a datapad and wiggled it around.

"How do you even get these things?" One of the others made a grab for it and missed.

"That's for me to know and you not to find out." The datapad was lifted tauntingly out of reach.

"Pft." Rolled optics accompanied the sound. "C'mon. Everyone knows that bar's a front for him and his little 'movement'."

Orion synthesized a cough. "Excuse me." All antics suddenly ceased, one mech frozen mid-lunge at another, who had leaned precariously back to hold the pad high over his helm. All optics swivled to stare at him. "Might I borrow that datapad?"

The lunger settled back down on his feet, and the lungee lowered his arm, clearing his intakes somewhat self-consciously. “This wouldn’t interest you, Pax. This mech’s not history - not yet, anyway.”

Unpleasant laughter followed. Orion held out his hand. “Nevertheless.”

The bot hesitated, and then handed it over with a shrug. “Alright. Suit yourself.”

“Thank you. I will return it to you when I have finished.”

Another shrug. “Don’t bother. It’s nothing important. Just a bit of entertainment.”

\---

Orion devoured the words on the datapad during his refueling break, leaving the cube beside him almost untouched as he read. A soft internal ping from his chronometer told him he was about to be late, and he hastily gulped down the remaining energon before stowing the pad safely in his desk and hurrying back to work.  After his shift was over, he retrieved the pad again, sought out a quiet corner of the Hall - an old, rarely used reading room, filled with thousands of years of fuel requistion requests and tall, narrow windows that looked out over  the Sea of Light - and settled down to continue reading.

He read and read, and on every page, in every line, the archivist found thoughts that echoed his own. An impassioned deconstruction of the caste system lead smoothly into a forceful denunciation of the resulting inequalities among the masses, and Orion caught himself nodding along as he read. Then the author shifted into an barely restrained tirade against the  corruption spreading throughout the upper classes, festering and growing there and within the Senate itself, and his words gave Orion pause.

The archivist looked up and took a moment to focus himself, optics straying away from the pad in front of him. He'd yet to consider the possibility of corruption. He'd seen the inequalities in their society for himself, certainly, and recognized the caste system as their cause, but as for where it had come from? He'd yet to wonder.

Or - or maybe he had wondered, on some level at least, for the idea struck him not as a blinding revelation that left him stunned and staggering but as a cold trickle of realization that crept down his spinal strut to pool in his fuel tanks and weaken his knee joints and coil loosely around his spark. Those now all-too-familiar stirrings of unease in his processor spun up once again, faster than ever before, and then slowly coalesced into something concrete as the missing pieces fell into place at last.

He read on.

He had never heard another express these ideas, had only ever heard them echoing in the confines of his head, and yet here they all were, set down on the page by another.

All too soon, he had finished. But various other writings had been referenced and cross-referenced within the text itself, added in by the unknown transcriber. Those works had to exist somewhere. There had to be more. Orion pulled up the file itself.

There, imbedded deep within the code, he found it - the numerical combination that identified the source of the download. The transmission that had linked it to the pad had been heavily encrypted, but that would not present a problem for him, not after the ciphers of the Iaconian database. He opened a connection back to the server and commenced downloading more.

Files scrolled rapidly down the screen. Treatises on Golden Era society followed commentaries on the writings of the original Thirteen and were in turn superseded by manifestos on the fundamental rights of every Cybertronian. Whoever this Megatronus was, he was a prolific writer. Orion downloaded the entirety of his works, opened up the first file, and continued to read.

“Orion? What is it that you find so engrossing?”

Orion looked up. Outside, night had fallen, and through the narrow band of the window, he could see the lights of the towers of Iacon glowing against a darkened sky. Alpha Trion stood before him.

Under the pretense of straightening the pile in front of him, the data clerk quickly slid another pad over the pad that had so absorbed him. He was not supposed to have that pad, and he certainly was not supposed to have backtraced its contents to their origin to download more. He had no wish to lie to Alpha Trion, but attempting to explain the truth might prove to be…unnecessarily complicated. It was best to simply avoid answering at all.

Alpha Trion lifted the top pad from the stack and read aloud. "'Intracity-state Currency Exchange Rates Prior to the Introduction of the Shanix'." The master archivist raised a skeptical optic ridge. “And such dry reading is what has kept you here so late into the night?”

Orion remained silent.

After a moment, Alpha Trion chuckled and laid a hand on Orion’s shoulder. “Your devotion to your duties has always been commendable, Orion. But enough is enough, even for you. Return home. Your work will still be here in the morning.”

Orion rose and nodded, collecting the stack of datapads. “Of course, master archivist. Let me just return these to their proper locations.”

And he did. All of them but one.


End file.
